According to Yahoo! Sports, the Dodgers’ 2015 payroll projects to be an MLB-high $262.6 million. That includes players who are unsigned and eligible for salary arbitration, and players with 0-3 years’ service time who have not yet reached agreement on a 2015 contract.
The $262.6 million an estimate. So is the $275.2 million we estimated recently using a different methodology ($10 million combined for all 0-3 players, rather than $500,000 per player). As with all estimates, take each of those numbers with a grain of salt. Gather enough grains together, and you get a sense for the bigger picture.
The bigger picture is that the Dodgers are still baseball’s biggest spenders. From the Yahoo! piece:
Nearly two-thirds of the teams in baseball could start the season with $100 million-plus payrolls, with the Dodgers, Yankees ($210.9 million) and Red Sox ($180.5 million) all certain to exceed the $189 million luxury-tax threshold. Rounding out the top five payrolls are Detroit ($168.8 million) and World Series champion San Francisco ($160.7 million).
The biggest salary jump comes in Seattle, where the Mariners’ offensive additions bumped their payroll to an estimated $122.5 million, more than $30 million ahead of 2014. The Dodgers are second at $27.3 million, though in reality they’ll actually be spending less on players in their uniform this year: they’re paying a combined $37.5 million to cover the salaries of the released Brian Wilson and the traded Matt Kemp and Dan Haren.